​﻿​The Notes:

​A Blog

by S.J. Dunning

When I first started this project, it was still (kind of) summer. No rare, blood- super-moon had happened--nor had I tried to capture such with binoculars and an iPhone--and there had been no political debates (Republican OR Democratic), and my neighbor hadn't switched his soundtrack from WHAM! to Bob Marley, and I hadn't started teaching, and this blog(osphere) felt, meanwhile, like my oyster. I, in turn, felt like I had found where I belonged, and, as such, I had little doubt in my mind that I would write here at least two times a week, and that, god damn it, what I would write would be "epic," (very) relatively speaking.​But that obviously didn't happen like the moon, the debates, my neighbor's "evolution" in tunes, or the academic quarter did.

That said, I do have a more significant post- (in-the-making) sitting now in the "DRAFTS" section of this blog, a post I'm not ready to post because it got too big for the moment and is too big to revisit tonight. I started it at the end of last month, but I didn't finish it because my significant other came home early from the docks and we took a shot of tequila and talked about the memoir I wasn't writing, among other things, and, in that moment, that conversation felt more important than finishing my post, which I was probably overthinking anyway.

Then, school started, and I am a teacher, for better or worse.

"Time will pass either way," a wise writer said to me recently when I confessed that I had put my memoir on the back-burner, and I feel this is true about my blog posts as well, if not about life in general.

The literary cosmos, however, hasn't been silent in the interim.

In one of my last posts, I wrote about submitting an essay that means a great deal to me and how I was experiencing a combination of hope and doubt about (finally) (and again) submitting it (yes, I just used double parentheses).

The doubt and the hope have since subsided (time has passed either way, indeed), and, now, I'm just waiting, and happily so, as though no news truly is good news.

In the meantime, I received the happy news that a "flash nonfiction" piece of mine, titled "Let's Put on Kathy Kelly with Music," was accepted for publication at The Boiler, and I truly couldn't be happier about that.

That publication has no direct relationship to the subject of foreclosure, but I celebrate it still. I feel like that piece of writing sums up my aesthetic pretty well.Its foundation is a VHS home video that has become something of a phenomenon amongst my closest friends, and the message of the video is, from the vantage of time, both one of hope and of heartbreak.

It is a relic of viewing and absorbing a relic of the past (if that's possible).

It is, you might say, about nostalgia for nostalgia (and if I was skilled enough with video I might be able to digitize the VHS itself and post it here, but I'm not).More importantly, what I like about this piece is that, despite my efforts to revise it (to make it "better"), post my submission to the journal, the editors preferred the original version. I find this telling in terms of my (seemingly horrible) writing process in general.

​Here's the deer who is in the essay:

First thought, best thought, said, I think, Ginsberg. My point is that I'm still here.I'm just really busy, and time is passing.No matter what I do or don’t do. When I first started this project, it was still (kind of) summer.

Now, the leaves are falling from the trees, and some people I want to trust, and others, about whom I'm much less confident, are vying to (WO)man the country, and the rare, blood- super-moon has not ended the world (though I did hear there was an earthquake today), and my significant other is at the dock once again, and there is (I'm sad to say, in a way), no promise that he'll walk through the door and interrupt this post, so I must find an ending...What I want is to put on Kathy Kelly with music and to show it/listen to it with you, but my skills are not up to par at this moment.

So you'll have to do with the grainy photographs (of the video) I've provided. ​

Everything is at stake (with everything). Nothing is at stake (with anything).I overuse parentheses. That is what I do, for now. A symbol of my (best) thought.Worthy of protection? Or is this like the article I read today about how when women speak their mind there must always be a cushion?